How I Began to Hate the Moon

I think he sent it by text, it said, ‘she has such a moon face’, or maybe ‘her moon face’ or maybe ‘her face so large it could eclipse the moon’ it could’ve been email, the kind you had to dial up and wait for, the specifics don’t matter. He compared her to the moon and the thing is, I never much liked the moon and there he was, in my messages, comparing her to it and it’s not safe, not really, to ask if someone likes it or not, I mean, you’re meant to like the moon, aren’t you? Unless you’re Sylvia Plath. Plath, I thought and think, got the measure of the moon, if the moon smiled it would resemble you. I knew Plath then, when he sent me the messages about this girl and the moon and if I’ve been jealous once in my life, well.

Maybe I knew Plath too well. My own tulips had been too bright for too long for too many years, so bright they glowed until I wanted to rip them, to tear them with my teeth, to throw them to the bottom of the surgical bin but if you’re resigned to eating nothing the last thing you start with is flowers, and the moon, the great light borrower looked in the car window all those long trips home in the dark, from meetings, from assemblies, from the ministry and even though I was a child, I knew the moon to be a cold hard rock, I knew my father on the other side of the equator could not look up at it at the same time, a fucking cold rock, an accident, mocking me from its stolen glow. I knew myself to be solar powered, a lover of the light but never the dark or perhaps too akin to the darkness as he’d said to me earlier in the summer, so dark he said it frightened him and there he was, calling her the moon with no specifics attached and we’d sat up for many nights by this time; us, drunk and dry mouthed, the breaking light cold and uncaring and we’d skirted around the inevitable of the summer ending and there she was, the girl with the moon shaped face and my own face, long and narrow and as far from the moon as you could hope for, and how was I to know his feelings towards the moon. I did not ask those three full moons, half moons, new moons we spent together. I do not know how he felt about the moon. I prefer nights of full cloud cover still.